Friday

xvi

Français It is astonishing that despite the immoral lifestyle of Ptolemy IV he had good traits that cannot be ignored. After his return from the Syrian land, we find him giving a lot to the clergy and the Egyptian temples. He also kept erecting temples all over the country in a noticeable way to please the Egyptians. We also find that he glamorized the worship of the god Dionysus specially that on one side he was the god of wine and on the other he approximated the god Osiris for Egyptians. In addition to this, during his reign, the power of the clergy kept increasing to the extent that they mandated the use of the Egyptian language in writing official documents and translating them into Greek, something which had never been done before in the official documents of the Greeek. Finally, we find that Ptolemy IV annually recruited clergy for worshiping Ptolemy I and made him an official god as well as his wife Berenice in a similar fashion to what was being done for Ptolemy II and his wife Arsinoe II. Moreover, Ptolemy IV was a writer and poet. He has written fiction and poetry which he dedicated to Homer, the father of Greek poets. In any case, history stands puzzled towards the conflicting stories that have reached us about this ruler. In conclusion, he has combined an immoral lifestyle together with one full of religion, science and art.

In any case, his age is considered to be a turning point in the history of Egypt. For it was in his age that patriotic emotions came to life in the souls of the Egyptian people whom rejected being controlled all along their history except in cases of falling under extreme pressure.